Where are they now? Game features/mechanics that mysteriously went MIA

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I normally don't like their "If ____ was 10 Times Shorter and 100 Times More Honest" things, but that one was pretty good.

I think of [the Internet] as a grisly raw steak laid out on a porcelain benchtop in the sun, covered in chocolate hazelnut sauce. In the background plays Stardust’s Music Sounds Better With You. There’s lots of fog. --tomeoftom

I miss Quake 3 and UT being the gold standard of multiplayer shooters, not that I was any good at them but being able to move that fast, jump that far, rocket jumping, strafe jumping, guns that don't need to be reloaded and all that sort of stuff... That was fun. Like real fun. I think that's why I enjoyed the hour or so I played of Serious Sam: BFE. I know it hasn't really disappeared but I, like the entire internet over the age of about 18, am getting a bit (no, a lot) tired of modern warfare shooters. I do like Battlefield 3 but that's because the maps are huge and I play with a small group of guys regularly who actually use tactics, which I also enjoy (as those from the GRFS thread might've noticed).

I miss being able to sprint for more than 5 seconds at a time (ME3 got this right, unlike every other AAA game in the past 2 years or so).
Being able to carry more than 2 guns and a grenade (again, if EAware can do this then so can every other big-name developer studio).
Secrets in levels along with multiple ways of doing a level (props to Dishono(u)red for doing this).
Cheat codes for singleplayer games.
Space sims in which the entire known universe cannot be crossed in less than two hours in a Yugo.
Games that go full-on rule of cool instead of trying to be realistic and failing miserably.
Good Star Wars games (last one I can think of was the original Empire at War, after that it just declined into a pit of mediocrity).
Games companies not treating PC users as second-class citizens (honorary mention to Valve for doing the exact opposite until a few months ago).
Indie games that aren`t 8-bit puzzle platformers trying very hard to hide the fact that they`re the umpteenth generic Braid clone that got on Steam because Valve are basically EA with a bit of leftover consumer goodwill.
Games that aren`t set in either a generic modern military nonsense "conflict" or a future where everyone is inexplicably using the same weapons as today despite having orbital railguns, laser weapons, and perhaps the occasional bit of gravity control. The ones with full-on space opera are even worse, (Halo, Gears to a certain extent, with bonus points for providing no explanation for why they renamed Earth all of a sudden; Mass Effect gets a free pass for giving a bit of thought to the thermodynamics and conservation of momentum-violating macguffin).

The movement styling of Mirror's Edge didn't get the hell copied out of it even after the sequel went under. This ... doesn't exactly amaze me because a lot of people thought that they were crap or that first person platforming is some sort of enhanced interrogation technique, but it does make me very sad.

Really good melee combat systems are slowly cropping up. Dark Messiah was good, I've heard there are older games that were good, Chivalry is pretty OK as is Warband, Dishonored is pretty ok, Lugaru is kind of awesome, and Jedi Knight Outcast/Academy is sort of like a less refined (namely, more random (in singleplayer, that is)) Lugaru in terms of mechanics but just as awesome anyway because of how great it feels and the additional frills of force powers ... but all-in-all, I haven't seen these sorts of systems evolve as much as I'd like. I would love to have Lugaru and Outcast/Academy merge and, with further refinement, create a suitably next-gen 3D melee fighting system. My dream, of course, would be to replace the force powers with Allomancy and have this game be the upcoming Mistborn video game but I doubt this will happen.

Edit: Zeno Clash was also OK.

While I'm at it, I would love to see a really solid 3D fighting system on par with Street Fighter IV and Capcom vs. Marvel -- obviously porting that genre into 3D requires some radically different ideas, though. Lugaru is a nice proof-of-concept for a relatively intricate fighting system that can operate in a not-exactly-arena-fighting setting and be simple enough to function reliably in 3D while also having a pleasantly steep learning curve. The key, though, and the reason this is a separate paragraph, is that I'd love to see the character-driven tactics, the mind-games and the room for growth found in the fighting games mentioned (less crazy with the difficulty of special moves, hopefully, because 3D). This is a bit off topic, though, as arena fighting isn't MIA at all even if the level of detail never really made it to 3D.

Ooh! Also, I'm surprised by how few non-Bioware games have tried to emulate Mass Effect's success. I am likewise both saddened and surprised no one has really tried to learn the lessons of Alpha Protocol.

Last edited by gwathdring; 19-01-2013 at 12:22 AM.

I think of [the Internet] as a grisly raw steak laid out on a porcelain benchtop in the sun, covered in chocolate hazelnut sauce. In the background plays Stardust’s Music Sounds Better With You. There’s lots of fog. --tomeoftom

In general, AI liberation. That is, AI used to simulate an opponent that plays against you on equal rights, as opposed to being just a moving target with a ton of HP.

I sort of agree, but AI cheats like that have been a cornerstone of enemy targets since... well, forever really. AIs have always cheated to get an advantage in pretty much every game, because AI is hard. But I do agree that having a dumb-as-rocks AI with six million HP in compensation is complete bullshit.

For me:
1. Large-scale RTS games that don't focus on loads of micro (but not Rome: Total War style, think TA)
2. For space sims: pretty much everything done by Freelancer (except the static universe)
3. Non-MODERN WARFACE shooters
4. Flight simulators that aren't X-Plane (MS could auto-gen airport scenery, these guys can autogen cities with proper roads but not airports?)
5. By extension, flight combat sims which aren't all about procedural switch-flipping.
6. Games that just had a straight out storyline without loads of meta-commentary or trying to be arty about it
7. Exploration of new gameplay mechanics instead of rehasing the 90s, following CoD, or silly art games which have no gameplay.

Things I don't miss (just to be different):
1. Cryptic interfaces that rely entirely on the manual to explain
2. Opaque and obscure mechanics that are never explained or rely entirely on the manual when there's no reason for it
3. Lack of adequate tutorial or in-game information
4. Arena shooters like Q3A
5. Vertical climb difficulty

I'm with you on this one. Other storyline things that need to make a comeback include not having a "clever" twist just because a clever twist is like a contractual obligation.

Completely agree with this. It seems that lately most games have either a bad story, or a bad story but its a deconstruction that the point woah, which is fine, but when there's no good stories to balance those out it gets kind of dull.